It always amazes me just how long the SD card is sticking around. And yes, I've done the budget laptop thing, and eventually those all became very thin clients or donations to people I didn't like. At some point, you have to realize that good technology costs money, or be really patient on finding deals.

Part of the problem surely is that for those odd occasions when you are doing something a Chromebook can't, that's when you wish you had a "real" computer, and most people who are buying a Chromebook instead of a "real" computer aren't going to be carrying around two devices like you were.

As an "extra" computer, it's feasible, or for limited use people (such as, not to overgeneralise, older people who aren't doing much more than emailing to stay in touch with people etc). But on a longer term basis, if you're wanting to do "stuff", can you realistically get away with it being your one computer?

As an "extra" computer, it's feasible, or for limited use people (such as, not to overgeneralise, older people who aren't doing much more than emailing to stay in touch with people etc). But on a longer term basis, if you're wanting to do "stuff", can you realistically get away with it being your one computer?

I would say that I do lots of "stuff" on my Chromebook - I'm a PhD student in computer science, and I'm on the laptop all day, essentially. It does everything that I need it to, which consists almost entirely of a browser and an ssh client (so I can log in to our lab's workstation to write and run code). For the rare occasion that I need X, I've installed crouton, so I can chroot into Ubuntu and get a full Linux desktop on it. I also, just for fun, installed Android 4.3 on an SD card, and I can boot into that when I want to play with a larger screen android "tablet". I'm incredibly happy with the Chromebook Pixel that I got for $900 on ebay (the LTE version - they're pretty cheap on ebay right now, because of all of the people that got them for free at Google I/O and want to sell them).

...For the rare occasion that I need X, I've installed crouton, so I can chroot into Ubuntu and get a full Linux desktop on it. I also, just for fun, installed Android 4.3 on an SD card, and I can boot into that when I want to play with a larger screen android "tablet". I'm incredibly happy with the Chromebook Pixel that I got for $900 ...

These seem like good arguments to like the Pixel hardware but find Chrome limited.

This is a nice, balanced article without the usual tech press hyperbole ("Why ChromeOS will destroy Microsoft!" "Why ChromeOS is completely useless!"). Thanks for avoiding the ideological stuff and giving some useful details about how the Chromebook fits your workflow.

Yeah, and I could probably get the rest of the way there with a Lightning to SD adapter. An experiment for another show, maybe. :-)

I've done blogging-from-a-holiday, including RAW-format pictures from a DSLR, just using iPhoto on an iPad and a lightning-to-SD adaptor. It's not perfect - at least at the time iPhoto would not import pictures that the camera had marked as being taken in portrait mode, so I had to turn off the marking and spend twenty minutes at the end of the holiday rotating pictures. But it basically worked.

I'd have been inclined just to turn off RAW-mode on the DSLR, but you're probably dealing with such low-light conditions at CES that you have to under-expose and recover in post-processing - I was using RAW because I was at an exhibition of spot-lit primary-coloured shiny glass things against black backgrounds and the camera was tending to saturate the red channel unless I turned exposure down several stops.

I think these articles, however, suffer from being written by people who are fairly technical and also highly mobile (and that includes me). While I couldn't work with a Chromebook professionally, I'm still interested in one for home use.

But for a lot of the population:

1. The majority of laptops, tablets and Chromebooks hardly ever leave the house, if at all. Probably as many as two-thirds.2. Taking my mother as an example, she uses her laptop PC for web-browsing, email and video chats, she writes letters on Microsoft Works and she uploads pictures from her camera. All these things can be done on a Chromebook. And I suspect there are an awful lot of people like her.

Therefore, the idea of an idiot-proof OS that does all the basics is quite appealing. Just not to a lot of Ars readers and writers.

How about replacing the Chrome OS with a Linux distro like Mint or Elementrary?

I thought the purpose of the exercise was to see how far ChromeOS could take him in "real world" use?

Could have just installed Ubuntu 12.04 in a chroot via Crouton. That way things that absolutely can't be done under ChromeOS (eg image editing) are just a shitf-ctrl-alt-<right arrow> away. That way there's not need to carry another computer.

It always amazes me just how long the SD card is sticking around. And yes, I've done the budget laptop thing, and eventually those all became very thin clients or donations to people I didn't like. At some point, you have to realize that good technology costs money, or be really patient on finding deals.

Yeah, you get what you paid for. Seriously.

I've been looking for an unsuspecting victim to gift my Netbook to but no luck. People can sense these things from few yards away and run away. So no, I'm not buying into another cheap laptop scheme. Got an Air, loaded OSX and Windows and I have the best of both worlds.

"This is a nice, balanced article...giving some useful details about how the Chromebook fits your workflow. "

With all due respect to 'afty', this article is neither well-balanced, nor about how the Chromebook fits your workflow.It IS about how the Chromebook does NOT fit your workflow.It IS balanced from the standpoint of your pointing out some serious hardware limitations (power/speed, lack of an SD card slot), but unacceptable from the standpoint of addressing (non)upgradeability, and, perhaps, more seriously, the lack of ethernet capability.

You are MOST remiss in not emphasizing the most egregious shortcoming of the entire Chromebook paradigm: the ability to use this machine as a personal computer without being tethered to an external communications source. MY personal computers will ALWAYS be under my total control. You don't want the same? That's your (serious) problem; not mine.

Major, MAJOR question: how did Google EVER foist this ridiculous substitute for a personal computer on the world?

I predict a certain death of this device as its designed-in major serious limitations become well-known amongst the general public. Can you say "(dedicated) e-Book reader", boys and girls?

Question for all you technophiles who absolutely MUST have--and be SEEN with--the latest technology.

Linus Torvalds inexplicably (I'm not going to even GO there) went all gaga-eyes over the Chromebook Pixel. You are absolutely certain that this became his MAIN MACHINE, aren't you?

The ChromeBook IS worse than a NetBook. It is a cheaper and more limited version of a NetBook.

You might as well get a real NetBook like a lightweight Windows 8 Laptop with a touch interface.

Or simply get a MacBook Air.

Either option would be so much better and just as light as a ChromeBook.

"Simply" spend 3-5x the price. There are clear limitations to Chrome OS by itself that will hopefully be rectified by more native programs from Google, but the performance issues can almost entirely be eliminated by moving to a Haswell equipped device.

They're probably all terribad, but at least they exist (and would have got you further than the Chromebook did).

Yeah, and I could probably get the rest of the way there with a Lightning to SD adapter. An experiment for another show, maybe. :-)

This will get massively downvoted, but...

This site's becoming like Fox News for Apple fans. Every category where Apple doesn't have an offering gets a critical article pointing out the shortcomings - which is certainly fair, but there is an underlying current of "If Apple did it, it would be perfect." Usually, the author of a given article will agree. There are also a lot of speculation pieces (SmartTVs don't quite make their target which was followed by a chorus of "I can't wait till Apple creates the ONE TV!" in the comments.) Folks, it's okay for other people to not use Apple products for everything. It's okay that some people like Windows, droid devices, and other flavors of unix.

Please, cover CES with an ipad mini next time, with no external keyboard. I'd love to hear how that goes.

It's just a brochure for Las Vegas, a town that tries way too hard to make you feel like you're living ON THE EDGE even though all you're REALLY doing is drinking crappy beer and playing $5 blackjack in a hotel casino.

They're probably all terribad, but at least they exist (and would have got you further than the Chromebook did).

Yeah, and I could probably get the rest of the way there with a Lightning to SD adapter. An experiment for another show, maybe. :-)

This will get massively downvoted, but...

This site's becoming like Fox News for Apple fans. Every category where Apple doesn't have an offering gets a critical article pointing out the shortcomings - which is certainly fair, but there is an underlying current of "If Apple did it, it would be perfect." Usually, the author of a given article will agree. There are also a lot of speculation pieces (SmartTVs don't quite make their target which was followed by a chorus of "I can't wait till Apple creates the ONE TV!" in the comments.) Folks, it's okay for other people to not use Apple products for everything. It's okay that some people like Windows, droid devices, and other flavors of unix.

Please, cover CES with an ipad mini next time, with no external keyboard. I'd love to hear how that goes.

We write tons and tons of non-Apple articles and plenty that are critical of the company, so on that count you'll just get downvotes because you're wrong.

Obviously we can't control what people say in the comments, but I'd guess that people want to see Apple offerings in these categories because Apple has historically been pretty good at entering existing markets and rethinking the way products work in sensible and beneficial ways.

They're probably all terribad, but at least they exist (and would have got you further than the Chromebook did).

Yeah, and I could probably get the rest of the way there with a Lightning to SD adapter. An experiment for another show, maybe. :-)

This will get massively downvoted, but...

This site's becoming like Fox News for Apple fans. Every category where Apple doesn't have an offering gets a critical article pointing out the shortcomings - which is certainly fair, but there is an underlying current of "If Apple did it, it would be perfect." Usually, the author of a given article will agree. There are also a lot of speculation pieces (SmartTVs don't quite make their target which was followed by a chorus of "I can't wait till Apple creates the ONE TV!" in the comments.) Folks, it's okay for other people to not use Apple products for everything. It's okay that some people like Windows, droid devices, and other flavors of unix.

Please, cover CES with an ipad mini next time, with no external keyboard. I'd love to hear how that goes.

This reads more that you aren't happy with how competent Apple devices are. I've never owned a Mac, iPhone or iPad, but I recognize that they're extremely useful for most purposes.

...For the rare occasion that I need X, I've installed crouton, so I can chroot into Ubuntu and get a full Linux desktop on it. I also, just for fun, installed Android 4.3 on an SD card, and I can boot into that when I want to play with a larger screen android "tablet". I'm incredibly happy with the Chromebook Pixel that I got for $900 ...

These seem like good arguments to like the Pixel hardware but find Chrome limited.

Note that I said "Chromebook", not "ChromeOS". The title of the article also said "Chromebook". But in any event, ChromeOS does the "browser + ssh client" very well; way better, in fact, than Windows, OSX, or Linux, precisely because it doesn't have all of the extra cruft that I don't need (that's the point of the stratechery article I cited above). It's simple, fast, and secure. It means I only have to maintain one machine (my workstation), instead of two (my workstation and my old laptop). I don't, actually, find ChromeOS to be severely limiting, because it does everything that I need it to. And I don't fall into the "technologically illiterate" camp that many people say is the only real market for Chromebooks.

How about replacing the Chrome OS with a Linux distro like Mint or Elementrary?

I thought the purpose of the exercise was to see how far ChromeOS could take him in "real world" use?

Could have just installed Ubuntu 12.04 in a chroot via Crouton. That way things that absolutely can't be done under ChromeOS (eg image editing) are just a shitf-ctrl-alt-<right arrow> away. That way there's not need to carry another computer.

I guess the main issue with my original post is I said Chromebook, when really I meant ChromeOS.Installing another OS in order to do stuff means that really you're just buying a cheap laptop, which the article implies is something the Chromebook would replace doing.

If you are instead just buying a Chromebook to put another OS on it, you are just buying a (cheap) laptop (ignoring the fact you got an expensive Chromebook, as this article seemed to conclude more on replacing "PCs" at the low end).

If you say "ChromeOS can do nearly everything but I can install another OS for non-Chromebook tasks", then why did you buy a Chromebook? Why not just buy a laptop (sans OS, which sometimes you can actually do) and then just use the other OS all the time.

How about replacing the Chrome OS with a Linux distro like Mint or Elementrary?

I thought the purpose of the exercise was to see how far ChromeOS could take him in "real world" use?

Could have just installed Ubuntu 12.04 in a chroot via Crouton. That way things that absolutely can't be done under ChromeOS (eg image editing) are just a shitf-ctrl-alt-<right arrow> away. That way there's not need to carry another computer.

I guess the main issue with my original post is I said Chromebook, when really I meant ChromeOS.Installing another OS in order to do stuff means that really you're just buying a cheap laptop, which the article implies is something the Chromebook would replace doing.

If you are instead just buying a Chromebook to put another OS on it, you are just buying a (cheap) laptop (ignoring the fact you got an expensive Chromebook, as this article seemed to conclude more on replacing "PCs" at the low end).

If you say "ChromeOS can do nearly everything but I can install another OS for non-Chromebook tasks", then why did you buy a Chromebook? Why not just buy a laptop (sans OS, which sometimes you can actually do) and then just use the other OS all the time.

Yeah this test was more for a Chromebook as-is, but you can do more with them if you like to hack around. The 16GB of storage most of them have is a real limiter though.

It means I only have to maintain one machine (my workstation), instead of two (my workstation and my old laptop).

Adding Ubuntu for a full linux desktop and SD card bootable Android seem a bit like maintaining to me.

The SD card booting into android was purely for fun, not so I could use the machine for work. I admit that crouton adds some amount of maintenance overhead, but it's also not really necessary for work. As I said, it's only very rarely that I ever have a desire to use crouton. Almost always I just use the browser and the ssh client, and ChromeOS is the best operating system I've ever used if that's all you want to do. And it maintains itself, there is quite literally nothing to do to maintain it. You just log in. Adding crouton doesn't mean that I have to maintain the ChromeOS side, which is what I use the vast majority of the time.

This was an interesting investigation into how little computing can you get by on. The usual hierarchy is text, audio, image, video, and it sounds like you were pushing the envelope with the HP 11 when you got into image processing, but that it's probably fine for text and mixed text and video viewing. I'm willing to bet it's aces as an MP3 player or quick voice recorder.

It sounds like a usable solution for a lot of people, but close to the bottom end. You could probably move up to a more powerful HP Chromebook with an Intel processor for not a whole lot more. Of course, you're walking around with a Canon Rebel that takes 18MP images. You would probably have done better with a computer that cost as much as your camera. (If you had a $500 audio capture device, you would have probably be in the same boat and noticed the machine's limitations. Ditto for video.)

Out of curiosity, how well did the HP 11 play video, e.g. a ripped DVD or streamed file? I'm guessing it would be passable, but that no one would want to do serious video editing on such a device.

Most of those commenting here use computers in their work, and that means they usually want power to spare. If you write code, you probably sit idle in a text editor or reading documentation most of the time, but there is nothing like the tedium of a big build. If you deal with large raw images, multi-channel audio or HD video, you will usually be fine with your machine coasting, but every so often you will find yourself in the passing lane and really appreciating what an extra few hundred dollars can buy you.